Reel to Reel
9780226110639
9780226110776
Reel to Reel
Reel to Reel, Alan Shapiro’s twelfth collection of poetry, moves outward from the intimate spaces of family and romantic life to embrace not only the human realm of politics and culture but also the natural world, and even the outer spaces of the cosmos itself. In language richly nuanced yet accessible, these poems inhabit and explore fundamental questions of existence, such as time, mortality, consciousness, and matter. How did we get here? Why is there something rather than nothing? How do we live fully and lovingly as conscious creatures in an unconscious universe with no ultimate purpose or destination beyond returning to the abyss that spawned us? Shapiro brings his humor, imaginative intensity, characteristic syntactical energy, and generous heart to bear on these ultimate mysteries. In ways few poets have done, he writes from a premodern, primal sense of wonder about our postmodern world.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
One
Wherever My Dead Go When I’m Not Remembering Them
Reel to Reel
The Family Bed
Wave
The Gate
Aging Lovers
The Cave
Thought Experiment
On Thumbing through Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation
Taung Child
Gravity
In Winter
Disaster Movies
Beach Towel
Law of Motion
Absolute Zero
You
Emissary
Dialogue
Two
Homeric Turns
Three
The Bridge
Politics
Angel
The Open Door
Grace
Spooky Action at a Distance
Phantom
Saint Christopher
Whatever Else They’re Singing
Scatter
Sun
The Not LordBe the first to know
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